Over on my Facebook Page and during recent Leveraging Social Media Peer Group discussions, there have been questions about Edgerank and colleague Devon Smith has been experimenting. What is it and what it means to use it as a measurement for improving Facebook engagement on your Facebook Page? This post summarizes some of the key points and resources shared.

Edgerank Is To Facebook As Pagerank is to Google

Edgerank is algorithm that determines if content on Facebook shows up on your fans or friends newsfeeds. This is how people may see content that you’ve shared on your wall and actually click over to comment. Since it is a mathematical equation – definitions can get geeky and complex. Mari Smith translates how it works into simple English.

Affinity = the relationship between you and each individual fan. That is, how often a fan views and interacts with your Facebook page and individual posts. Plus, how much you engage with your fans: Facebook rewards you for building relationships!

Weight = typically, photos receive the highest weight, followed by videos, links, status updates and apps. Manual posts receive more weight than posts by apps.
Time = the more recent your post, the higher your EdgeRank score. A popular piece of content will stay for a longer period of time in the News Feed of your fans.

Measuring Your Edgerank Score

Edgerank Checker makes it easy to check your score and provides a scale – it also gives you information about the best day of week for acquiring new fans and generating engagement. If you listen to the screencast by Amy Porterfield it will walk you through how to use this tool and what it means. My page score for the past week was 32, which seems to be above average. It was particularly high this week because I’ve been a/b testing different engagement techniques and some of them seem to be working!

Beware of AVES: Assessment by Voodoo Economics

I learned a new term from colleague, KD Paine, AVE, who is attending a conference where measurement professionals are debating communications and social media measurement and ROI standards . AVES is the process of using bogus social media metrics to indicate value — metrics like influencer scores. I wondered whether using your edgerank score could potentially be a form of AVEs. Some feel that it should be ignored and focus on Insights data for feedback rate and impressions for individual pieces of content. Others, feel it should be used in addition to.

Using Edgerank Checker to look at your score (not in isolation) but reflecting on why you got a higher score during a particular week and using that information to guide your content and engagement tactics could help you improve engagement on your Facebook Page. And that might be something to spend your valuable time doing if increasing engagement on Facebook leads to real results. (Also found another tool that helps with measuring engagement on Facebook called “Fangager” – gives you an “active fan” rate)

You could systematically test using best practices against your score. Remember, measurement isn’t counting – you have avoid looking at numbers out of context. You need to use the data to reflect and improve what you’re doing! And pick meaningful metrics as KD Paine says in the tweet below.

Like a Klout score, this is a metric that brings out the competitive egomania of all of us. We just love comparing ourselves to other people and either feeling good or bad about ourselves depending on the results.
Maybe I’m doing it wrong since my Edgerank is all of a 1. Which means that I am clearly a total loser. I am now drowning my sorrows with a fine port next to the swimming pool in Lisbon 🙂
Seriously, I applaud anything that helps people get more engaged. But I worry that tools like this encourage people to behave in ways that can game the system, rather than being real and authentic and delivering better, more relevant content.
It also assumes that your target audience is all on Facebook.